On August 16, 2005, I became a roller coaster.
Now, I should mention before that I’ve written about this before. On my old website, I posted an entire series about a bunch of weird things that happened to me in the summer of 2005. It all culminated in me thinking I became a roller coaster. And while I can most certainly say I’m not a hunk of metal four hundred and twenty feet up in the sky, I have a better understanding of why I claimed that as my identity for so long -- and why I’m daring to reclaim it.
Buckle up, folks, literally. By the time you’re done with this post, I will not be the same.
--
Since the original post is no longer live, I’m gonna pull a couple of things from it and post them here. We go back to August 16, 2005. I was seventeen years old, at Cedar Point with friends, and the day was ending:
I got pulled from the queue line before I could ride, as we had to leave. We all ran back across the park to get to the front gate:
When I got to that front gate, I believed I was something else entirely. And I had to hide it from the world. Who wants their daughter running around telling the world she’s a roller coaster? I knew I had been inspired by the coaster to be something more than myself, to aspire to more and more, but it was more than that, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I left it alone. It was a gift from God, right? So it was something I had to cherish and make sure nobody took away from me.
I posted my original blog series on this topic in the summer of 2016. Shortly afterward, I had someone else message me, telling me that they thought they were a roller coaster, too. I thought that it was weird at first, but then I realized that maybe this person would actually accept me as I was, call me by my roller coaster name. She did. And I was out of friends. I had been left for another woman. I was leaving New York City. I needed someone to talk to, and she was there.
What I didn’t count on was her being mentally ill, enough to have her mother have power of attorney over her. When her mom found out we were talking, I got a nasty three-way phone call about roller coasters and her daughter’s own queerness and it was all too much. I decided I was sick of this Top Thrill Dragster business. I had moved home in part to be closer to Cedar Point, but I was also scared to death that this lady or her mother would find some way to come after me.
So I made the biggest mistake I could ever think of to do: I simply just decided I wasn’t going to be a roller coaster. I wasn’t going to be anything but Emily. Just Emily. Just plain old boring human Emily who went skating with this strange man she had just met at the local arcade, and worked a boring desk job, who would someday get married and have kids and be normal. That’s all I wanted to be.
Just Emily.
My mistake was in thinking that this Emily ever existed in the first place. Because she never did.
--
I first knew I was gay in 2003, I believe. Fanfiction.net did it to me. Kids like myself would write stories online pairing together their favorite characters from anime, in ways that the source material would never dare to do. It happens, still, today, in 2020. It happened in the 1970’s by way of Star Trek fanzines. Slash fic happens.
And I hated Emily, back then, for that. I hated that Emily couldn’t just like guys the same way every other ‘girl’ did. I kind of did! I thought they were cute, but I couldn’t understand this concept of this is sexy and you should take off your clothes for this. Once I was relatively secure that I would never like what was in a man’s pants, I would joke with my friends that I’d run screaming from it. Which, in case you’re wondering, is still a valid assumption today.
At some point, I figured out that I’d much rather have one of those things-in-mens-pants than be attracted to one. But it didn’t matter to me either way. I was still in Jesus group back then, so these were things that were never voiced out loud. And then my parents found out I was dating a girl at high school and that went over about as well as you could assume in 2005. Ten years later, they’d make up for it when I came out as an adult.
But I became aware of things. Subtle things. The fact that I really liked my hips because they were straight, and that when I walked, I tried to walk straight as well, with a man’s walk instead of swaying my hips like a woman would. That some days I would be comfortable with showing off my chest, and others I would throw a hoodie over it and call it a day. That I hated it when my hair got too long, and if I couldn’t get it cut, I would throw it back into a ponytail. That I lived in bachelor pads and I got a thrill whenever anybody said that.
There was, at one point, a time where I desperately wished that I could just turn into a man. But only for a while. It was at some point just out of college, maybe when I first got to New York City, that I learned a term for it. Genderfluid. This feeling of not really belonging to any gender in particular, but kind of changing in between them depending on the day and how you’re feeling, almost. It made sense to me. I wasn’t a boy, or a girl, really! Sometimes I’d be a boy if I was crossplaying at an anime convention, or hanging out at home watching a ball game. And when I went shopping at Forever 21, I was definitely a girl. But most of the time I was just this weird thing in the middle that didn’t have a gender.
Most of the time, I was just Top Thrill Dragster. This weird thing in the middle that didn’t have a gender. Roller coasters don’t have genders. They’re roller coasters. What I didn’t know then was that when I looked up at the roller coaster that day fifteen years ago, I wanted to become it. I wanted to be anything but myself, anything but the screw up girl who was forced into becoming a lady, who couldn’t become who she wanted to be and was stuck wearing pantyhose to every piano event she had to play at.
So instead of identifying with this girl everybody else saw me as, I identified with a roller coaster instead. When I ‘became’ Top Thrill Dragster, I unknowingly embraced my nonbinary identity. It was on this power that I created the Heaven’s Light single, that I started NaNoWriMo, and that I powered my way through college and everything that came after. It was the reason for my nonstop energy. Nobody needed to know I was a roller coaster -- and nobody needed to know I was nonbinary, either! What mattered to me was that I knew the truth.
When I threw away the Top Thrill Dragster identity, I threw away my nonbinary identity as well, though I didn’t know it at the time. And that’s where the problems started.
--
Emily as a nonbinary person has always existed. Emily as a genderfluid person has always existed. Emily as solely a girl, as solely a woman, has never existed, never will.
Emily is sometimes a girl, and he’s sometimes a boy, too! But Emily is mostly just Emily. And for a long time, I was okay with people just calling me a girl or a woman or what not. “You can call me a girl, just don’t expect me to act like one.” Now, I realize that was wrong. It was inconsistent with the gender identity that I have, and it was dysphoric, and I shouldn’t have allowed it. Because it gave people the OK to think, “Emily’s always been weird, but she’s pretty brilliant with everything else, so we’ll let it slide.”
Emily’s not weird, fam. Emily’s non-binary. And what I realized as a teenager was that nobody would ever see me as non-binary under that name. They would always see me as “Emily Imes, music extraordinaire, the ‘sick’ piano player, violinist, author, illustrator, you name it she does it!” I hated that name, how it rolled off my tongue like a piece of black licorice, Emily Imes. I added my middle name to my artist name in 2013 because I figured it would help, and it did for a while.
But I hated that my music, my writing, my entire livelihood stood on top of this “Emily Imes” identity. This Emily Imes that didn’t exist was what I was supposed to market. This lady with all this talent. Who was this lady? I didn’t have a damn clue. And so I didn’t market her. I made music in secret and I worked on it and I’d have to somehow find a way to push it into this neat little pink box labeled “Emily Ann Imes,” knowing that as a woman this person would never be as successful as a man. It was how the world worked, I had been told a bajillion times before. I hated this Emily. How was I supposed to market her? How many pencil skirts would she have to shove herself into in order to get a piano playing gig? (In case you’re curious, there was a lot of chest showing-off that happened in NYC. It was used as a marketing tool. It was gross. But I was broke and hungry.)
But of course I didn’t fully understand this at the time. Gender dysphoria was something that happened to transgender men and women. If I was non-binary, I just had to suck it up and deal with it, right? Just like everybody had always told me before. Suck it up, buttercup. Life’s not fair. Deal with your long hair and your chest and just embrace it! Body positivity! It felt like my body, I was cool with some things, but there were others that I hated. Mostly what everybody else wanted me to do with it. I would buy makeup, wear it for a while, then stop. I have always been most comfortable in a black t-shirt and jeans instead of something fancier. And don’t even get me started on what everybody expects a woman’s body to just do before it’s 35.
I never wanted to be Emily. I wanted to be Little Rabbit, the name I wrote under on Fanfiction.net. I wanted to be Haruka. I wanted to be Top Thrill Dragster, and I got that. I wanted to be me, apart from this female identity that everybody had created for me. And then, when I perceived danger, I threw it away and hid, just like every other trauma response I’ve been a part of. When someone is threatening me, I freeze. I hide. I stop whatever is bringing the threatening, so hopefully the trauma and pain will stop as well.
It was safer to be Emily. I told myself that I would throw all of my vitality into being Emily. I could do this. I’d done a bunch of much harder things before, right? This was a piece of cake. Except this was Portal, and the cake was a lie.
--
I ‘stopped’ being Top Thrill Dragster after I met Mike. I figured it was easier that way.
In the summer of 2017 I figured out I had all this music I had semi-recently written, and I could release it as an album. North Side Angel was the product of that, a product I’m still proud of. 2017 Emily figured it would be the last thing I would release before I changed my image -- to that of super feminine cutesy Akiba Idol Emily! I wanted to rebrand my image in a way that fit my music. This involved me trying to find ways to do live performances in short skirts for people online.
I had a mental breakdown when I tried to make the skirt. Mike made it for me.
The project lasted for about three months, and then optimism for it just...died. I kept trying to force myself to make music for it, to promote it. I wanted to be as cute as all of the other overseas idols! And with my real world performing experience, I knew I could make it a hit. But I didn’t want to. My soul was adamant about it, and I hated myself at the moment for not understanding why.
I had another mental breakdown at Matsuricon 2018 over it.
I went to a counselor to figure out what I wanted to do with my music. I just...couldn’t make the magic happen. Every time I sat down to write or play, nothing came out. My counselor helped me remember my dream of going to grad school. I had wanted to go since 2011, but I was in New York City then, and that would have been crazy to pull off. I got a teacher. I started practicing. It was hard. In retrospect, it wasn’t hard because the music was hard, or making time for practicing.
It was hard because Emily, the lady, was practicing, and Emily, the lady, did not exist.
But apparently things were supposed to be hard now, and this was my life, and life was hard. So I dragged myself through practice, and through lessons, and to auditions and through performances. I wore pretty dresses and flats, but said no thanks to the pantyhose because I was still non-binary, I just had to present as a woman if I was going to get anywhere with my marketing.
And I feared the future. I feared having to go out there as a woman, standing on stage giving a lecture about music theory or how Liszt was the first music idol while everybody looks back at me and goes, “There’s Emily Imes, the washed up has-been who went to New York City and failed! Isn’t she married yet? Why is she even here?” Mike had to talk me down, because I was convinced I would have to figure out a plan for after school before I went to school, and it was causing my brain to brick hard. How was I supposed to go out there and be Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome, for the rest of my life, when I was really Emily Imes, Just a Person?
I feared things I didn’t even know or understand yet. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just get over myself. I blamed it on a lot of things. I blamed it on the roommate who did us wrong. I blamed it on my own laziness. I blamed it on working a normal job and being tired after a long day. I never in a million years would have realized that what I should have done was say to myself, “Emily, you’re pretending to be a woman. You’re not a woman. You need to be just a person. You need to be nonbinary.”
And then it clicked. Not because of roller coasters, not because I suddenly went back to Top Thrill Dragster. It clicked because the coronavirus shut me inside my house for months on end. And it clicked because of BTS. Because everything, for me, is somehow now about BTS.
--
As I’ve written, I was kind of a mess during NaNoWriMo 2019. We had successfully evicted an manipulative individual who had taken over my life with a severe case of trauma bonding. Without her to care for and fawn over, I had no identity at all. How was I supposed to write anything in that state?
I began working on my idea, but another idea popped up in my head: a BTS fanfiction. Ugh, I thought to myself. Why the freak is this invading my mind? But it wouldn’t leave me alone, and my main word count was floundering, and I finally bit it. In the immortal words of Suga from BTS, I said: God damnit. So I worked on both ideas simultaneously.
And I had this crazy idea. What if I actually finished this fanfic book and published it for everybody to see? While publishing the Dvorak series, I had a Wattpad account; Wattpad is where all the K-Pop kids hang out. Someone might actually read it. But the last thing I wanted was to be on Wattpad as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome, Right Next To Her Dvorak Books And Her Fanfiction From A Dead Band. Plus, the lady we had just evicted would find it, and she would use it as a way to manipulate herself back into my life.
I started a new Wattpad account. I told NOBODY about it. I mean, I told Mike, but I didn’t tell him the username or anything. To this date, nobody still knows what it is. But in making it, I gave myself a name that nobody else would ever know, and more importantly: I stated my pronouns up front. Non-binary. They/them pronouns, please.
And I began to write. And as a non-binary writer, hiding on the Internet, I flew for the first time in three years. I had the energy to throw out works left and right, even as I still worked on my BTS novel. As things were closing left and right, I found myself resigned to staying in my house for weeks on end. No roller coasters, no arcades, not even shopping for clothes. But what I did have was a computer, and so, I wrote. I wrote for everybody else who was stuck in their houses around the world. I made friends, and I slowly realized that there was a freedom in these new friends not seeing me as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome. They just saw me as, for lack of a better name, Top Thrill Dragster the Nonbinary BTS Fanfiction Writing Roller Coaster.
And I would write, and I would interact as actual me, and then I’d have to go back to the real world, put aside the computer, and start barely functioning as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome again. I knew someday someone would find out, and I’d have to combine things, tell everybody that Top Thrill Dragster the Nonbinary BTS Fanfiction Writing Roller Coaster was secretly Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome! Surprise! She’s a lady! Look at all these things she has done over the years! Look at her in all of her glory!
It was during a recent convo with these new friends that one of them piped up: You leave them alone! I found them first! They’re mine! That thrill, the moment when I realized I was gendered correctly! Nobody knows my fake identity here. They only know my real one! And I started deciphering what that meant. It wasn’t just as simple as being out. I was me on this little account with these little BTS fanfictions. What if I was me everywhere else? What would that look like? And I had a feeling I had been me before, but I no longer felt that way. When had that changed?
Being at home means you have a lot of time to yourself. It enabled me to think, and then think some more. I eventually realized it all went back to the connection I had formed with a roller coaster a long time ago. I had gone to Cedar Point every summer still, after I stopped being a roller coaster, but it just wasn’t the same going as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome. And here I was, during a year when I probably wasn’t going to Cedar Point at all, realizing that I’m still a roller coaster. I’ve always been a roller coaster. I just didn’t believe myself.
But it’s not so much that I’m a roller coaster, or I have magic powers, or dumb crap like that. What it means is: I’m a non-binary person who identified with a roller coaster a long time ago, because a roller coaster is a thing without a gender, just like me. I’ve always been non-binary. I even knew I was non-binary. I just didn’t believe that I could make it in the world as someone who was non-binary. As someone who is genderfluid, I figured I could just pretend to be a girl forever in order to have an image that would sell. I was wrong. I have sinned against myself. And I apologize to myself at this moment. In this moment, what is right and healthy for me to do is to embrace my actual identity, even if that means being a roller coaster, especially if that means being non-binary.
I know this is probably the most roundabout confusing thing you’ve ever had to read by me. To be honest, I still don’t understand everything myself. It hasn’t fully clicked yet. When I’m done with this, I’ll probably think of ten different ways I said things wrong, and then try to force myself back into the Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome box. But it’s Pride month, and it’s Remembrance Day, and I still want to go to an amusement park even if all I do is walk around, just to remember who I truly am.
So, who am I?
My name is still Emily Ann Imes. For now.
I don’t even know what I would change my name to. But there’s one thing I know for sure: the name Emily Imes is not consistent with my gender identity. It’s not. I feel like all I’m doing is hurting my parents by saying that, but it’s not. So, I will probably change it someday. But not for now. If my timeline stays the same, I’ll have a better idea of what I’d like my name to be when I get married, and I’ll change the whole thing in one go, pick a new first name that’s not gendered and goes with my partner’s last name.
I haven’t decided if I’m still cool with people calling me Emily in the future. It would certainly help other people. It would make things easy for my parents. But ultimately, I’ve never been fair to myself in this entire process. So I don’t know if letting people still call me Emily when I’m actually myself, actually by a name that represents me, is fair to me. If you’re non-binary or transgender, I’m cool with hearing your opinion on it if that’s okay. But only if you’re non-binary or transgender. And none of that is set in stone yet. I’m just testing the waters.
One thing’s for sure: I’m not a Lady of Awesome. So I would appreciate it if you stopped calling me that.
I want to cut my hair shorter. I want to do something about my chest. I never want to physically have kids. Those are the main points of my physical gender dysphoria. Changing any of those things will not make me any less beautiful of a perceived lady -- or any less handsome of a perceived man! But they will influence how I perceive myself, and they will match my baseline gender more closely.
Call me Emily. Call me non-binary. Use they/them pronouns. I’ve been getting used to them. But really: if you remember to, ask! Ask what my pronouns are! Because I’m non-binary, but at the core I’m genderfluid, so my pronouns change. I even have a little badge I put on my convention badges that says, “I’m genderfluid! Ask me for my pronouns!” If you remember to ask, ask! If you forget and use they/them, that’s cool too! If you use she/her, that’s okay! But please for the life of me do not call me a lady or a woman straight to my face. And try to perceive me as just a person, inhabiting a lady’s body. Try, if you can, to strip away the societal expectations of this or that, of the picture you’ve painted that Emily Imes must be. Because I guarantee that the most awesome parts of me -- the music writing, the author things, the crazy fantastic person that you know is Emily -- exist outside of gender.
So. Just call me Emily. And, if you dare, call me Top Thrill Dragster. Especially if we’re at Cedar Point. You might just get a hug out of me.
Now, I should mention before that I’ve written about this before. On my old website, I posted an entire series about a bunch of weird things that happened to me in the summer of 2005. It all culminated in me thinking I became a roller coaster. And while I can most certainly say I’m not a hunk of metal four hundred and twenty feet up in the sky, I have a better understanding of why I claimed that as my identity for so long -- and why I’m daring to reclaim it.
Buckle up, folks, literally. By the time you’re done with this post, I will not be the same.
--
Since the original post is no longer live, I’m gonna pull a couple of things from it and post them here. We go back to August 16, 2005. I was seventeen years old, at Cedar Point with friends, and the day was ending:
Solo queue time was a time of reflection. Just four months earlier, my father had condemned me (for being a lesbian) and my mother had misunderstood me. Since then, God had changed me from the inside out, claimed me as His when I had chosen Him above all else(…) But that was something my parents couldn’t see. For all I knew, they still believed I was a deviant who spent all of her time in the basement. And I was certain my relationship with my dad would never heal.
I knew if I could just get to college, then I’d be free to make my own decisions. I’d feel a lot less shame about myself. Being at home felt like being stuck in a bird cage...which was the exact opposite of how I felt in Christ, how I felt on the Vortex at Kings Island, how I felt now while standing in line for Magnum, watching Top Thrill Dragster race for the sky again and again.
I got pulled from the queue line before I could ride, as we had to leave. We all ran back across the park to get to the front gate:
We approached Top Thrill Dragster, on my right side, and I ran right past the grandstands. Okay, so when I get there, I’ll say I’m sorry, and then I’ll probably get scolded, but it will be okay. Because I’m sorry. I’m always sorry.
I raced right past Dragster and toward Corkscrew’s huge turns. There’s nothing else I can do. I’m trapped. My dad won’t let me be myself. But I meant what I said to Megan. I’m gonna keep going and keep creating, and keep making music and writing. Even if my dad tries to stop me. Even if anybody tries to stop me! I know that God’s ahead of me, leading my path. I’ll be free someday and create on my own, for Him.
To be free, to be able to fly like that --
I raced right past Dragster and toward Corkscrew’s huge turns. There’s nothing else I can do. I’m trapped. My dad won’t let me be myself. But I meant what I said to Megan. I’m gonna keep going and keep creating, and keep making music and writing. Even if my dad tries to stop me. Even if anybody tries to stop me! I know that God’s ahead of me, leading my path. I’ll be free someday and create on my own, for Him.
To be free, to be able to fly like that --
When I got to that front gate, I believed I was something else entirely. And I had to hide it from the world. Who wants their daughter running around telling the world she’s a roller coaster? I knew I had been inspired by the coaster to be something more than myself, to aspire to more and more, but it was more than that, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I left it alone. It was a gift from God, right? So it was something I had to cherish and make sure nobody took away from me.
I posted my original blog series on this topic in the summer of 2016. Shortly afterward, I had someone else message me, telling me that they thought they were a roller coaster, too. I thought that it was weird at first, but then I realized that maybe this person would actually accept me as I was, call me by my roller coaster name. She did. And I was out of friends. I had been left for another woman. I was leaving New York City. I needed someone to talk to, and she was there.
What I didn’t count on was her being mentally ill, enough to have her mother have power of attorney over her. When her mom found out we were talking, I got a nasty three-way phone call about roller coasters and her daughter’s own queerness and it was all too much. I decided I was sick of this Top Thrill Dragster business. I had moved home in part to be closer to Cedar Point, but I was also scared to death that this lady or her mother would find some way to come after me.
So I made the biggest mistake I could ever think of to do: I simply just decided I wasn’t going to be a roller coaster. I wasn’t going to be anything but Emily. Just Emily. Just plain old boring human Emily who went skating with this strange man she had just met at the local arcade, and worked a boring desk job, who would someday get married and have kids and be normal. That’s all I wanted to be.
Just Emily.
My mistake was in thinking that this Emily ever existed in the first place. Because she never did.
--
I first knew I was gay in 2003, I believe. Fanfiction.net did it to me. Kids like myself would write stories online pairing together their favorite characters from anime, in ways that the source material would never dare to do. It happens, still, today, in 2020. It happened in the 1970’s by way of Star Trek fanzines. Slash fic happens.
And I hated Emily, back then, for that. I hated that Emily couldn’t just like guys the same way every other ‘girl’ did. I kind of did! I thought they were cute, but I couldn’t understand this concept of this is sexy and you should take off your clothes for this. Once I was relatively secure that I would never like what was in a man’s pants, I would joke with my friends that I’d run screaming from it. Which, in case you’re wondering, is still a valid assumption today.
At some point, I figured out that I’d much rather have one of those things-in-mens-pants than be attracted to one. But it didn’t matter to me either way. I was still in Jesus group back then, so these were things that were never voiced out loud. And then my parents found out I was dating a girl at high school and that went over about as well as you could assume in 2005. Ten years later, they’d make up for it when I came out as an adult.
But I became aware of things. Subtle things. The fact that I really liked my hips because they were straight, and that when I walked, I tried to walk straight as well, with a man’s walk instead of swaying my hips like a woman would. That some days I would be comfortable with showing off my chest, and others I would throw a hoodie over it and call it a day. That I hated it when my hair got too long, and if I couldn’t get it cut, I would throw it back into a ponytail. That I lived in bachelor pads and I got a thrill whenever anybody said that.
There was, at one point, a time where I desperately wished that I could just turn into a man. But only for a while. It was at some point just out of college, maybe when I first got to New York City, that I learned a term for it. Genderfluid. This feeling of not really belonging to any gender in particular, but kind of changing in between them depending on the day and how you’re feeling, almost. It made sense to me. I wasn’t a boy, or a girl, really! Sometimes I’d be a boy if I was crossplaying at an anime convention, or hanging out at home watching a ball game. And when I went shopping at Forever 21, I was definitely a girl. But most of the time I was just this weird thing in the middle that didn’t have a gender.
Most of the time, I was just Top Thrill Dragster. This weird thing in the middle that didn’t have a gender. Roller coasters don’t have genders. They’re roller coasters. What I didn’t know then was that when I looked up at the roller coaster that day fifteen years ago, I wanted to become it. I wanted to be anything but myself, anything but the screw up girl who was forced into becoming a lady, who couldn’t become who she wanted to be and was stuck wearing pantyhose to every piano event she had to play at.
So instead of identifying with this girl everybody else saw me as, I identified with a roller coaster instead. When I ‘became’ Top Thrill Dragster, I unknowingly embraced my nonbinary identity. It was on this power that I created the Heaven’s Light single, that I started NaNoWriMo, and that I powered my way through college and everything that came after. It was the reason for my nonstop energy. Nobody needed to know I was a roller coaster -- and nobody needed to know I was nonbinary, either! What mattered to me was that I knew the truth.
When I threw away the Top Thrill Dragster identity, I threw away my nonbinary identity as well, though I didn’t know it at the time. And that’s where the problems started.
--
Emily as a nonbinary person has always existed. Emily as a genderfluid person has always existed. Emily as solely a girl, as solely a woman, has never existed, never will.
Emily is sometimes a girl, and he’s sometimes a boy, too! But Emily is mostly just Emily. And for a long time, I was okay with people just calling me a girl or a woman or what not. “You can call me a girl, just don’t expect me to act like one.” Now, I realize that was wrong. It was inconsistent with the gender identity that I have, and it was dysphoric, and I shouldn’t have allowed it. Because it gave people the OK to think, “Emily’s always been weird, but she’s pretty brilliant with everything else, so we’ll let it slide.”
Emily’s not weird, fam. Emily’s non-binary. And what I realized as a teenager was that nobody would ever see me as non-binary under that name. They would always see me as “Emily Imes, music extraordinaire, the ‘sick’ piano player, violinist, author, illustrator, you name it she does it!” I hated that name, how it rolled off my tongue like a piece of black licorice, Emily Imes. I added my middle name to my artist name in 2013 because I figured it would help, and it did for a while.
But I hated that my music, my writing, my entire livelihood stood on top of this “Emily Imes” identity. This Emily Imes that didn’t exist was what I was supposed to market. This lady with all this talent. Who was this lady? I didn’t have a damn clue. And so I didn’t market her. I made music in secret and I worked on it and I’d have to somehow find a way to push it into this neat little pink box labeled “Emily Ann Imes,” knowing that as a woman this person would never be as successful as a man. It was how the world worked, I had been told a bajillion times before. I hated this Emily. How was I supposed to market her? How many pencil skirts would she have to shove herself into in order to get a piano playing gig? (In case you’re curious, there was a lot of chest showing-off that happened in NYC. It was used as a marketing tool. It was gross. But I was broke and hungry.)
But of course I didn’t fully understand this at the time. Gender dysphoria was something that happened to transgender men and women. If I was non-binary, I just had to suck it up and deal with it, right? Just like everybody had always told me before. Suck it up, buttercup. Life’s not fair. Deal with your long hair and your chest and just embrace it! Body positivity! It felt like my body, I was cool with some things, but there were others that I hated. Mostly what everybody else wanted me to do with it. I would buy makeup, wear it for a while, then stop. I have always been most comfortable in a black t-shirt and jeans instead of something fancier. And don’t even get me started on what everybody expects a woman’s body to just do before it’s 35.
I never wanted to be Emily. I wanted to be Little Rabbit, the name I wrote under on Fanfiction.net. I wanted to be Haruka. I wanted to be Top Thrill Dragster, and I got that. I wanted to be me, apart from this female identity that everybody had created for me. And then, when I perceived danger, I threw it away and hid, just like every other trauma response I’ve been a part of. When someone is threatening me, I freeze. I hide. I stop whatever is bringing the threatening, so hopefully the trauma and pain will stop as well.
It was safer to be Emily. I told myself that I would throw all of my vitality into being Emily. I could do this. I’d done a bunch of much harder things before, right? This was a piece of cake. Except this was Portal, and the cake was a lie.
--
I ‘stopped’ being Top Thrill Dragster after I met Mike. I figured it was easier that way.
In the summer of 2017 I figured out I had all this music I had semi-recently written, and I could release it as an album. North Side Angel was the product of that, a product I’m still proud of. 2017 Emily figured it would be the last thing I would release before I changed my image -- to that of super feminine cutesy Akiba Idol Emily! I wanted to rebrand my image in a way that fit my music. This involved me trying to find ways to do live performances in short skirts for people online.
I had a mental breakdown when I tried to make the skirt. Mike made it for me.
The project lasted for about three months, and then optimism for it just...died. I kept trying to force myself to make music for it, to promote it. I wanted to be as cute as all of the other overseas idols! And with my real world performing experience, I knew I could make it a hit. But I didn’t want to. My soul was adamant about it, and I hated myself at the moment for not understanding why.
I had another mental breakdown at Matsuricon 2018 over it.
I went to a counselor to figure out what I wanted to do with my music. I just...couldn’t make the magic happen. Every time I sat down to write or play, nothing came out. My counselor helped me remember my dream of going to grad school. I had wanted to go since 2011, but I was in New York City then, and that would have been crazy to pull off. I got a teacher. I started practicing. It was hard. In retrospect, it wasn’t hard because the music was hard, or making time for practicing.
It was hard because Emily, the lady, was practicing, and Emily, the lady, did not exist.
But apparently things were supposed to be hard now, and this was my life, and life was hard. So I dragged myself through practice, and through lessons, and to auditions and through performances. I wore pretty dresses and flats, but said no thanks to the pantyhose because I was still non-binary, I just had to present as a woman if I was going to get anywhere with my marketing.
And I feared the future. I feared having to go out there as a woman, standing on stage giving a lecture about music theory or how Liszt was the first music idol while everybody looks back at me and goes, “There’s Emily Imes, the washed up has-been who went to New York City and failed! Isn’t she married yet? Why is she even here?” Mike had to talk me down, because I was convinced I would have to figure out a plan for after school before I went to school, and it was causing my brain to brick hard. How was I supposed to go out there and be Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome, for the rest of my life, when I was really Emily Imes, Just a Person?
I feared things I didn’t even know or understand yet. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just get over myself. I blamed it on a lot of things. I blamed it on the roommate who did us wrong. I blamed it on my own laziness. I blamed it on working a normal job and being tired after a long day. I never in a million years would have realized that what I should have done was say to myself, “Emily, you’re pretending to be a woman. You’re not a woman. You need to be just a person. You need to be nonbinary.”
And then it clicked. Not because of roller coasters, not because I suddenly went back to Top Thrill Dragster. It clicked because the coronavirus shut me inside my house for months on end. And it clicked because of BTS. Because everything, for me, is somehow now about BTS.
--
As I’ve written, I was kind of a mess during NaNoWriMo 2019. We had successfully evicted an manipulative individual who had taken over my life with a severe case of trauma bonding. Without her to care for and fawn over, I had no identity at all. How was I supposed to write anything in that state?
I began working on my idea, but another idea popped up in my head: a BTS fanfiction. Ugh, I thought to myself. Why the freak is this invading my mind? But it wouldn’t leave me alone, and my main word count was floundering, and I finally bit it. In the immortal words of Suga from BTS, I said: God damnit. So I worked on both ideas simultaneously.
And I had this crazy idea. What if I actually finished this fanfic book and published it for everybody to see? While publishing the Dvorak series, I had a Wattpad account; Wattpad is where all the K-Pop kids hang out. Someone might actually read it. But the last thing I wanted was to be on Wattpad as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome, Right Next To Her Dvorak Books And Her Fanfiction From A Dead Band. Plus, the lady we had just evicted would find it, and she would use it as a way to manipulate herself back into my life.
I started a new Wattpad account. I told NOBODY about it. I mean, I told Mike, but I didn’t tell him the username or anything. To this date, nobody still knows what it is. But in making it, I gave myself a name that nobody else would ever know, and more importantly: I stated my pronouns up front. Non-binary. They/them pronouns, please.
And I began to write. And as a non-binary writer, hiding on the Internet, I flew for the first time in three years. I had the energy to throw out works left and right, even as I still worked on my BTS novel. As things were closing left and right, I found myself resigned to staying in my house for weeks on end. No roller coasters, no arcades, not even shopping for clothes. But what I did have was a computer, and so, I wrote. I wrote for everybody else who was stuck in their houses around the world. I made friends, and I slowly realized that there was a freedom in these new friends not seeing me as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome. They just saw me as, for lack of a better name, Top Thrill Dragster the Nonbinary BTS Fanfiction Writing Roller Coaster.
And I would write, and I would interact as actual me, and then I’d have to go back to the real world, put aside the computer, and start barely functioning as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome again. I knew someday someone would find out, and I’d have to combine things, tell everybody that Top Thrill Dragster the Nonbinary BTS Fanfiction Writing Roller Coaster was secretly Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome! Surprise! She’s a lady! Look at all these things she has done over the years! Look at her in all of her glory!
It was during a recent convo with these new friends that one of them piped up: You leave them alone! I found them first! They’re mine! That thrill, the moment when I realized I was gendered correctly! Nobody knows my fake identity here. They only know my real one! And I started deciphering what that meant. It wasn’t just as simple as being out. I was me on this little account with these little BTS fanfictions. What if I was me everywhere else? What would that look like? And I had a feeling I had been me before, but I no longer felt that way. When had that changed?
Being at home means you have a lot of time to yourself. It enabled me to think, and then think some more. I eventually realized it all went back to the connection I had formed with a roller coaster a long time ago. I had gone to Cedar Point every summer still, after I stopped being a roller coaster, but it just wasn’t the same going as Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome. And here I was, during a year when I probably wasn’t going to Cedar Point at all, realizing that I’m still a roller coaster. I’ve always been a roller coaster. I just didn’t believe myself.
But it’s not so much that I’m a roller coaster, or I have magic powers, or dumb crap like that. What it means is: I’m a non-binary person who identified with a roller coaster a long time ago, because a roller coaster is a thing without a gender, just like me. I’ve always been non-binary. I even knew I was non-binary. I just didn’t believe that I could make it in the world as someone who was non-binary. As someone who is genderfluid, I figured I could just pretend to be a girl forever in order to have an image that would sell. I was wrong. I have sinned against myself. And I apologize to myself at this moment. In this moment, what is right and healthy for me to do is to embrace my actual identity, even if that means being a roller coaster, especially if that means being non-binary.
I know this is probably the most roundabout confusing thing you’ve ever had to read by me. To be honest, I still don’t understand everything myself. It hasn’t fully clicked yet. When I’m done with this, I’ll probably think of ten different ways I said things wrong, and then try to force myself back into the Emily Imes, Lady of Awesome box. But it’s Pride month, and it’s Remembrance Day, and I still want to go to an amusement park even if all I do is walk around, just to remember who I truly am.
So, who am I?
My name is still Emily Ann Imes. For now.
I don’t even know what I would change my name to. But there’s one thing I know for sure: the name Emily Imes is not consistent with my gender identity. It’s not. I feel like all I’m doing is hurting my parents by saying that, but it’s not. So, I will probably change it someday. But not for now. If my timeline stays the same, I’ll have a better idea of what I’d like my name to be when I get married, and I’ll change the whole thing in one go, pick a new first name that’s not gendered and goes with my partner’s last name.
I haven’t decided if I’m still cool with people calling me Emily in the future. It would certainly help other people. It would make things easy for my parents. But ultimately, I’ve never been fair to myself in this entire process. So I don’t know if letting people still call me Emily when I’m actually myself, actually by a name that represents me, is fair to me. If you’re non-binary or transgender, I’m cool with hearing your opinion on it if that’s okay. But only if you’re non-binary or transgender. And none of that is set in stone yet. I’m just testing the waters.
One thing’s for sure: I’m not a Lady of Awesome. So I would appreciate it if you stopped calling me that.
I want to cut my hair shorter. I want to do something about my chest. I never want to physically have kids. Those are the main points of my physical gender dysphoria. Changing any of those things will not make me any less beautiful of a perceived lady -- or any less handsome of a perceived man! But they will influence how I perceive myself, and they will match my baseline gender more closely.
Call me Emily. Call me non-binary. Use they/them pronouns. I’ve been getting used to them. But really: if you remember to, ask! Ask what my pronouns are! Because I’m non-binary, but at the core I’m genderfluid, so my pronouns change. I even have a little badge I put on my convention badges that says, “I’m genderfluid! Ask me for my pronouns!” If you remember to ask, ask! If you forget and use they/them, that’s cool too! If you use she/her, that’s okay! But please for the life of me do not call me a lady or a woman straight to my face. And try to perceive me as just a person, inhabiting a lady’s body. Try, if you can, to strip away the societal expectations of this or that, of the picture you’ve painted that Emily Imes must be. Because I guarantee that the most awesome parts of me -- the music writing, the author things, the crazy fantastic person that you know is Emily -- exist outside of gender.
So. Just call me Emily. And, if you dare, call me Top Thrill Dragster. Especially if we’re at Cedar Point. You might just get a hug out of me.
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